SuSE and Apache weirdness…
13 Jul 2004I’m in one of those really frustrated geek moods, so if you don’t understand/enjoy these rants, skip reading this post.
ARGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!qvaorentfq34iogfaenrgnoaerg~!!!!!
WHY CAN’T SUSE JUST BE NORMAL?! I mean, I know it’s German and all that, but still! HISSSSSSSS!!!! You know what? Technically, the way it’s setup the whole Apache configuration thing is probably FAR better than anything else I’ve ever seen! No, more than that… it IS better setup. It is structured VERY nicely, and, despite the lack of YaST configuration options (who needs GUI’s anyway?), very easy to use. Except for some bloody impossible issue it seems to have with accessing files!
So, setting up a virtualhost has never been so simple and quick and… yeah, just generally nice. Admittedly, I think it still needs a restart, but hey, what’s new?
All is good. Until, of course, you try and point the DocumentRoot to somewhere vaguely useful. In my case, somewhere inside my home user directory (/home/josh) – I have a development folder setup, which I previously had an IP-based vhost setup to point to for all local development and testing (/home/josh/MyDocs/webdevelopment – /home/josh/public_html also symlinks there). This is where it all starts to become somewhat flaky.
By default (yeah, whoever built the RPM was a bit of an odd one…), mod_userdir is ENABLED… not for vhosting or anything special, just accessible via http://servername/~*/ – and that will point to /home/*/public_html where * is the username. Okay. So, I’ve generally got about three accounts setup on my desktop. Root, which is never logged into (although su’d into often enough that perhaps I should actually login properly…), my user account, for everything under the sun, the home directory of which resides on a separate physical volume (40GB ext3), and a (passwordless) guest account for use of miscellaneous others. No, I’m not too worried about leet hax0rs reading this and compromising my b0xen… sitting comfortably behind another IP filtering bundle of joy, and I’m not too scared of the other machines on my own network, at least, not most days of the week.
So. The guest user works interestingly. /home/guest/public_html corresponds to http://localhost/~guest/, which successfully produces a directory listing (albeit one without any actual files – the directory is currently empty). Try the same with MY account, and all I get is a schnazzy 403 forbidden page.
That is, of course, when I have the symlink to my development folder there. Were I to simply have a folder there, all works perfectly. So why don’t I just be a big boy, get over it, and move the development folder? Hmm. Well, there’s about 1.5GB of data in there (1,585,358,110 bytes, to be exact), and certain editing applications would probably try to hang me out on a tree if I just moved it without informing them. And I could inform them, but it’d take time.
Oh, yeah, and it’s like admitting defeat. Yeah, it’s a computer, but I can be more stubborn, so there!
Hmm. So it’s looking like it has some kind of random opposition to symlinks, as of right now… but that shouldn’t be a problem! Grrrr!
Personally, I’m suspicious of all this wizard-driven crap SuSE is trying to pull… there is an extent to which I’d like to be able to do things for myself, without having to give the proverbial finger to a bunch of automated mechanisms which attempt to do it for me and fail miserably. Case in point, the YaST printer setup tool and ptal/hpoj configuration.
Hmm. If anyone has any ideas, feel free to throw them this way… I know what the REAL solution is, but I don’t particularly want to setup another computer just for the purpose of web-serving, because that would involve buying another hard-drive with money I don’t have.
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